by Dante King
However, the spear did not strike its target. A deft swat from one of the enormous paws sent the spear spinning away.
The lion-like head turned to look at me. Its mouth opened. It let out a roar that shook my brain in my head, addling my thoughts and blurring my eyes.
“Shit!” I said. If I was totally honest, this hadn’t been the way I had expected things to pan out. I had thought that I would have at least scratched the goddamn thing.
My vision blurred and vibrated as the lion head roared on.
Then, the bellowing suddenly cut out, and my vision realigned itself.
“Fuck man,” I said. “Realities within realities within realities. This is some Christopher Nolan shit.”
I was standing in the middle of what was, essentially, an armory, while a massive male lion prowled around the circular walls.
I’d played enough video games in my time to conclude that what we had here was a good, old-fashioned, multi-faceted boss level. This the lion, embodying pride, was the head of the beast that I had to take care of now.
How that would affect the sinbeast as a whole though, I had no idea.
“So, I have to take you down, huh?” I watched the huge lion as it continued to circle on paws that must have been about a foot wide. “And, I guess I have to pick one of these weapons to do it.”
My spear was gone, but I was surrounded by weapons that looked quite capable of taking down even the most jacked up and pissed off lion. There were your bog-standard blades and hammers and axes in uniform racks, but there were also singularly impressive weapons on plinths. There was a sword with a deep, red blade and a golden crossguard, a set of knives that glowed with a green eldritch light, and a compound bow strung with blue fire.
I considered using one of my Shadow Spheres but something in the back of my mind told me not to. This was, after all, a test against pride, and what was more proud than using magic to best this beast?
My hand reached toward a mace, the head of which was a diamond as big as a watermelon. The lion stopped in its pacing and let loose a deep, rumbling growl. It was a sound that called all the way back to my forefathers; back to the apes that had stepped out of the trees and attempted to cook their meat over a fire. It was a growl that spoke to my human arrogance at thinking that I was in some way better than all the other animals in the world.
Pride, I reminded myself. This thing is Pride. And the most effective and subtle weapon against Pride isn’t an inflated sense of hubris. My hand dropped from the shiny, blinging mace. The most effective weapon against Pride is unpretentious humbleness.
As if in retaliation to this thought, the lion roared and bounded across the room, a mass of coiled muscle and killing aggression.
My hand reached out with a swift surety and picked up a small nondescript dagger from a rack of nondescript small daggers.
I whirled as the lion flung itself at me; hundreds of pounds of honed, predatory hostility heading like an express train with a mullet at my throat.
With a dexterous spin, I pivoted and used the lion’s own weight to punch the small dagger right into the top of its head as it bulled past me. It was a slick move, but it would have looked way more badass if the lion hadn’t bowled me over as it cannoned past, sending me rolling head over heels and crashing into a plinth holding up a rather ornate club of carved bone and gold leaf.
However, the overall result looked to have been the same. As I got to my feet, my heart thundering inside my chest, I saw that the lion had been brought to bay. The great animal lay dead on the ground, the handle of the dagger protruding right from the center of its proud forehead.
I reached out and tugged the knife free.
The lion’s head exploded in a cloud of deep blue dust, and I was engulfed.
When the dust cleared, I was back in the grassy arena in which I had been left to face the sinbeast.
The great creature towered over me. It was shaking its six remaining heads and roaring in pain.
The lion-like head of the creature lay in the grass at my feet. My spear was back in my hands, the end slick with azure colored blood. I kicked the head away and pointed the spear at the creature in delight.
“All right, you bastard, let’s see the rest of you then!” I yelled.
Alone of all the other distressed heads, the sinbeast’s wolf head turned to regard me and then lashed out. It was furiously angry, completely frenzied with rage, and I remembered that it personified anger.
My spear came up to catch the wolf in its drooling mouth, but its maw seemed to grow as wide as a tunnel, and I was engulfed in blackness.
The blackness quickly brightened to a slate-gray, to an abalone-gray, before growing increasingly lighter. I became aware that I was standing in the middle of a perfectly crisp and snowy field, amidst hills that rolled out in every direction. There were a few thatched cottages dotted about in the distance, roofed in snow, with woodsmoke coming out of their chimneys in lazy white drifts. Trees were scattered with perfect randomness, and the fields were divided by hedgerows like sparkling cotton wool.
“How then,” I muttered aloud, my breath steaming out in front of me in the frigid air, “is this lovely scene about to get ruined?”
The answer came within moments. A howling filled my ears. It was a sound that, especially in that environment, chilled the blood.
In the far distance, a dark speck emerged over the brow of a far hill and quite literally became a blot on the landscape. It was joined by another, and another, and another and another and another. It could only have been a matter of heartbeats before a few wolves had turned into a veritable army of furious fur, teeth, and claws, all heading in my direction.
“Shit,” I said, “meet fan.”
There must have been a hundred of the things—more, even—streaming across the snow toward me. Churning the perfect, flawless white of snow into a mess of water and mud.
There were too many of them for me to have a chance against. The tide of Anger was washing toward me. It looked like all I could do was light the proverbial final cigarette, tie the handkerchief around my eyes, and wait for the inevitable.
I mentally reached into the Right Arm slot of my inventory and summoned a Shadow Sphere into my hand. Just like that, it appeared in my palm. A globe about the size of a tennis ball, filled with black and silver swirling smoke. It looked like the lovechild of a crystal ball and an M67 hand grenade.
I tossed it up and caught it. I stared across the shrinking belt of snow that divided me from the wolf hoard. There was one wolf out in front—the alpha, I assumed. It was boosting ahead of the others, its long pink tongue hanging out of its mouth, its eyes burning with an insatiable hate and directionless resentment.
Anger.
I lobbed the Shadow Sphere at this lead wolf. It was a damn good throw, judged to perfection and guided by fate or luck. The Shadow Sphere struck the wolf on the back and instantly whipped the beast away into the ether, with a violence that reminded me of a star imploding in on itself. One second the wolf was there, the next it had ceased to be. The lead wolf had winked out of existence, but the hundred other wolves kept coming, racing across the landscape.
No, I thought, that’s not the way to defeat anger. Anger can be relentless, but it has a weakness.
I summoned Noctis into being, climbed up onto his back, and took to the sky just as the ravening wolves entered the field. The noise and smell was unbelievable; the metallic scent of blood, the pungent aroma of the wet fur, the secondhand stink of rotten meat, and the dank stench of the forests from where the pack had come.
From a height of about fifty feet, I watched the wolves fill the entire field. They were snarling up at me in mad frustration, snapping their slavering jaws and rolling their ember eyes. They wanted, more than anything, for me to leap off Noctis’ back and dive into their midst so that they could rend me into hamburger meat.
I could feel the anger radiating off the mass of snapping, snarling creatures like heat, like cartoon stinkwa
ves.
And that was the thing about Anger; if you let it fester and gave it nothing to feed off at your end, that anger would eventually destroy itself.
It was all a little moralistic, but I guessed this was the lesson that this whole test was meant to instill in even the dumbest, blockhead of a prospective dragonmancer.
The wolves turned on each other within seconds. I tossed down the odd Shadow Sphere just to keep them going, vanishing one or two, but basically I just let them destroy themselves.
Within a surprisingly short time, the entire pack lay mangled and bloody across the landscape. The snow had gone from white to crimson.
There was, of course, always one survivor; the lone wolf that triumphs against the rest.
This survivor was a great, scarred brute of an animal with a missing eye.
I dropped down to hover some twenty feet above the wolf, while it jumped and leapt in a vain attempt to get its teeth on me or Noctis. Despite its powerful legs, its greatest leaps could not reach me while I flew atop Noctis. As it rose again, jumping and stretching to its full height, I dropped a Shadow Sphere into its mouth.
The wolf crunched down on the little globe of infinity and disappeared.
Instantly, a blizzard flared up, whipped out of nowhere by a sudden burst of wind, and the world dissolved into a sea of swirling snowflakes.
When the wind died and the snow cleared, I was standing once more in the luscious grassy arena with the sinbeast for company.
A fresh neck stump was fountaining blood into the air, and I felt some of it splash against my face. For a dream within a dream, spell within a trip, or whatever this weird, metaphysical experience was, the blood was certainly warm and sticky enough to pass for the real deal.
I rolled my shoulders as I sat atop my Onyx Dragon, while Noctis pranced around the enraged sinbeast like a cat toying with a mouse.
This was turning out to be somewhat easier than I had dared to expect, but I knew that I couldn’t get complacent. Confidence in one’s own abilities was one thing, but to be complacent in the face of the unknown was foolish.
The sinbeast whirled to face me again, its four remaining heads snarling and drooling and frothing. Lined up next to one another and arrayed upon a single body, the blood-splashed heads—the dog, the bear, the pig, and the goat—looked like some fucked up parody of a finger puppet show. They were snapping their heads in different directions, nipping each other and yelling unintelligibly into one another’s ears.
“Which one of you are next, then, eh?” I yelled.
Now that I knew the formula, I felt a bit more confident. I felt that, if I just faced each sin, one at a time, then the overall enemy wouldn’t seem so bad. It wasn’t overconfidence. Just the surety that I needed if I was going to get through this.
The dog—Jealousy—lunged at me. Noctis, rearing up on his hind legs like a war charger, slashed out with his claws at the dog head’s throat.
There was a flash of bright light, of lightning, and I found myself alone, in the middle of a large hall filled with stone statues, while outside a storm raged.
The heavy, oppressive base rumble of the thunder outside, the sporadic stark flash as forked lightning ripped across the sky, the hiss of rain, all these things somehow magnified the silence that reigned inside the hall of statues.
I took a few tentative steps into the hall. It looked to be one large open space, almost like a gallery. My footfalls were practically soundless on the wooden boards. Shadowy beams crisscrossed the roof overhead.
The statues, when I started to pay a little more attention to them, all depicted the same man. As I progressed through the aisles, I noticed that this man was slowly transforming and changing. The statues grew more hunched, more contorted, and the man’s expression became more blurred, more pained.
“What’s the gag here then?” I found myself speaking to the silence. “That jealousy twists a man over time? That’s a bit heavy-handed, isn’t it?”
There was a creaking of floorboards from behind me, and I turned, Noctis mentally slotted into my Right Hand slot. I had a Shadow Sphere in my hand and my arm was raised, ready to lob it at any motherfucker that came close.
But there was nothing.
Another flash of lightning lit the interior of the hall.
“Building the tension a little, huh?” I said.
I had made it to the middle of the hall now and the statues had taken on quite a change.
Quite a disquieting change.
Where, on the outer edge of the gallery, there had been a man sculpted, now there was a pretty grim-looking dog creature. Not quite what I’d call a werewolf, but something very much akin to it. It reminded me of pictures of Anubis that I had seen for that awful movie, Gods of Egypt. Only, this creature depicted in the statue had traded in all of Anubis’ austere commanding power for a straight grotesque savagery.
“That’s who’s coming for me, is it?” I asked the hall.
There was another flash of lightning. A quick moving shadow.
I went as if to turn around, but then stopped halfway and spun back.
The dog-man, the malformed monster from the final statue in the center of the hall, appeared in front of me. It had been going for the old you look right, I go left trick, but I’d seen that coming a mile away.
Jealousy can creep up on you if you let it, but it more often than not smacks you right in the face.
The dog-man growled at me, annoyed that I would make this a fight and not just let it seize me by the back of the neck in its jaws. Its body tensed. A long rope of shining saliva hung from its lips. Its teeth, when it pulled its top lip back to growl at me, were yellow and sharp as a boar’s tusks.
With a careful and slow flick of my thoughts, I moved Noctis into the Head slot of my inventory.
The dog-man sprang.
I teleported out of the way—by only a couple of feet, really—and reappeared behind where I thought the ugly bastard would land.
It was a buzzy and unique sensation, the teleporting part of things. It lay somewhere between falling asleep and waking up—all at the same time. It was a sort of sudden dreamstate where you went from one space to another, while simultaneously inhabiting both spaces at once.
I appeared exactly where I meant to, right behind the jealous asshole.
I pulled back my fist and drove with every ounce of strength I possessed right into the base of the twisted humanoid’s skull.
It should have knocked it out.
It might have killed it on a good day.
What shouldn’t have happened was nothing.
Jealousy, I guessed, was more tenacious than I gave it credit for.
The dog-man’s head jerked forward, but then the beast whirled and lashed out a clawed, twisted hand.
In the blink of an eye, I switched Noctis from Head slot to Chest. My new Onyx Armor rippled into being across my chest and down my limbs.
A life-saving action, no doubt, since the dog-man’s fist hit me in the chest like the macdaddy of all battering rams.
In normal circumstances, my chest would have caved in, my ribs reduced to splinters, and my internal organs pulped—if I was lucky.
However, thanks to the Onyx Armor, I was merely thrown off my feet and hurled about ten yards through the air. My back smashed through one of the statues that filled the room in an explosion of stone dust, and I skidded a few feet across the ground.
“Holy shit!” I muttered.
I looked down. The armor appeared to be a cross between medieval and tactical; the sort of thing that the Batman from Arkham Knight might have worn if he had to attend a jousting tourney. In the middle of the gleaming sable breastplate was something like a fiberglass partition. It was the same shape as the onyx crystal hanging around my neck, only larger. It was partly filled with a swirling, silver fog.
I looked up and saw the monster stalking toward me.
I rolled to my feet. I was amazed that, as far as I could see, the armor hadn’t so much a
s been scratched from that incredible blow.
I let loose a flurry of strikes at the dog-man as he came within range, both kicks and punches, but the monster simply took the blows on the chin and kept on coming. It feinted with a kick of its own, and then delivered an uppercut to my stomach that sent me into the stone ceiling with such force that rocks rained down with me as I fell back to earth.
Before I could collect myself, the dog-man struck me with a kick from its warped leg. The force of the blow lifted me off my feet, and I smashed through another statue or two in a cloud of dust and debris.
Jealousy wasn’t just powerful, it was persistent too.
The dog-man charged at me through the clouds of dust, snarling and roaring. I found myself at a loss at how to fight this thing. It was stronger and faster than me. It had me dead to rights. I just needed a little breathing space to collect myself. A little time.
Then, I saw that the glas cavity in my breastplate was pulsating with a silvery glow.
That must be the Chaos Magic, changed from the kinetic energy of that monster’s attacks, I thought.
Not quite knowing how I was meant to activate this freakin’ magic beam thing, I squared up to the charging hellhound and willed the stored Chaos Magic to smack it right in the chest.
Immediately, a beam of glittering light—more like air made solid than a laser beam—blasted out from the center of my chest. It hit the oncoming monster right in the middle of its torso and blasted it backward.
Had I shoved a Tomahawk cruise missile up my foe’s ass, the effect could not have been more extreme. The beast was smashed through a dozen statues, sending stone fragments and shrapnel flying in all directions, before it was punched two feet into the far solid stone wall.
The beam of Chaos Magic faded and died, leaving the magical reservoir empty.
“Yeah,” I said to myself. “Yeah. That’ll do.”
The sound of falling masonry from the far side of the room caught my attention.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I groaned.
The dog-man was making its way—a little unsteadily this time, it was true—toward me. It looked pretty pissed. It also looked a little wobbly on its feet.